Cheltenham festival – review

Taking its name from a mathematical term for a curve, the Parabola Arts Centre is clearly a great place to consider the relationship between music and maths, one of the themes of this year's Cheltenham music festival.

The Festival Academy players had the task of tackling Robert Saxton's piano quintet piece A Yardstick to the Stars. Its title was inspired by the Greek mathematician Hipparchus who, using a stick stuck in the sand, did pioneering work in astronomy and trigonometry. Using his principles, Saxton makes the piano describe a long arc, while the string quartet follows a straight line. It proved an unsettling half-hour: the sensation was of instruments pursuing different trajectories – going their own sweet way, yet occasionally touching something infinite. Young composer Patrick Brennan's Patterns in a Galactic Field, for solo piano and played by Huw Watkins, was a conscious emulation of Saxton's work, but confidently realised. Although brief, it's showed Brennan is clearly a name to watch.

Charlotte Bray got her festival commission for a piano quartet by winning the 2010 RPS composition award. Also inspired by spatial trigonometry, Replay used circular motion and cyclic transformation succinctly and idiomatically, so that the piano's urgently explosive moments, as well as its more ethereal engagement with the string trio, could reach a final distillation.

The capacity of the human brain may be mind-boggling, but so too was the performance of the Austrian Florian Boesch with pianist Roger Vignoles in his morning lieder recital at the Pittville Pump Room. Singing Loewe, Schubert and Mahler with an almost subversive demeanour, Boesch's expressiveness was extraordinary: the sensibility to words and vocal colours was both vivid and tender, while the narrative gripped. Stunning.